


your ghost is lingering

by nicheinhischest



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence, M/M, Reincarnation AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-05 12:19:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1818250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicheinhischest/pseuds/nicheinhischest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jimmy has these dreams of the skinny blond guy in his third period drawing class - Spencer - and sometimes it’s dreams where they're holed up in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, even though the closest Jimmy’s ever gotten to living in New York is a two-week vacation spent with his aunt and uncle and a handful of cousins in Poughkeepsie the summer before he enters high school.</p><p>Sometimes it’s so cold in the apartment the two of them can barely stand it. In those, Spencer looks worse for wear, a sickly and frail version of the one that roams the halls now, before good medicine and better living conditions, shivering like it’s the only thing he knows how to do. In <i>those</i>, Jimmy just wraps the last blanket around him and holds him close. </p><p>In those, he remembers winter always has to end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your ghost is lingering

**Author's Note:**

> HahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHA I don't even know. I started writing this last night and now it's this and I'm p sure only about ten percent of it makes sense but ANYWAY so I had to fudge some stuff to make the timeline(s) work but just uh - basically just pretend the Avengers happened without Cap?? I guess. Jesus. I don't even know what this is, alright, and also I really wanted to name Steve "Sam" but, like. _Sam_. 
> 
> Title is from ["I'm Gonna Wait" by The Temper Trap](http://youtu.be/as7conwHrU0) which I recommend listening to on repeat while you read. Warnings for mentions of alcohol abuse, smoking. Let me know if I should add something else.
> 
> (For Sarah and Crystal, who are both awful human beings who I love very much. Apologies if it disappoints, friends.)

Jimmy has these dreams sometimes of the skinny blond guy in his third period drawing class - Spencer, sort of a dork, but a cool one, if they even exist. A sophomore, nice to everyone, so Jimmy can’t even fault him much for always looking like he’s one sneezing fit away from winding up a permanent fixture at the Nurses' Station in between classes.

But so - he has these dreams, right? Only, Jimmy’s never spoken to him, not once in the few years they’ve spent in the same schools, in the same town. Sometimes it’s dreams where he and Spencer are holed up in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, even though the closest Jimmy’s ever gotten to living in New York is a two-week vacation spent with his aunt and uncle and a handful of cousins in Poughkeepsie the summer before he enters high school.

Sometimes it’s so cold in the apartment the two of them can barely stand it. In those, Spencer looks worse for wear, a sickly and frail version of the one that roams the halls now, before good medicine and better living conditions, shivering like it’s the only thing he knows how to do. In _those_ , Jimmy just wraps the last blanket around him and holds him close. 

In those, he remembers winter always has to end. 

*

Sometimes - sometimes he’s a soldier. Sometimes he’s alone. 

Except for when he isn’t.

Once, Spencer is with him again, covered in red white and blue, tall and strong and _brave_. Jimmy wakes up and Googles “Captain America” on his phone for one brief, delirious second before he falls into a sort of laughter that could be categorized as hysterical, if he lets it.

In a nightmarish few he’s _falling falling falling_ and then wakes up drenched in sweat, screaming himself hoarse while his mother - his mother, flustered and scared, - rocks him like he’s an infant again, tells him _it’s just a bad dream, sweetheart, that’s all_. 

He wakes up to those with honest-to-God tears in his eyes and this ache in his arm that won’t go away for a whole day afterward. Later, when he’s at school, he’ll pass Spencer in the hall and maybe they’ll look at each other and maybe they won’t but he _swears_ he sees something there, a sort of wide-eyed commiseration.

Jimmy never says anything to anyone about it, not his best friends or his parents or the school therapist. He considered, briefly, after the one where Not-Spencer kisses a pretty woman with bright red lipstick and a hard, determined stare who looks suspiciously like the Peggy Carter in their history books. Jimmy wakes up and feels _jealousy_ burn in his veins, wants to punch a wall before he remembers that didn’t happen, or maybe it did but he sure as _shit_ never saw it and -

He never says anything. 

Especially not to Spencer.

Not when junior year turns into senior year and senior year turns into graduation and graduation turns into driving halfway across the country for college. Not when he sees Spencer one last time before heading out.

Jimmy’s shoving boxes into his car for the university road trip, walks towards the bumper to shift stuff around in the trunk when he sees Spencer pedaling lazily down the block on his bike with one hand. He's shoving those hipster-y thick-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose and pushing the hair out of his eyes in one swift movement with his other.

He glances at Jimmy as he passes, and Jimmy's eyes follow him down the block until Spencer faces front again and speeds off a little faster.

And all Jimmy wants to do is say the name _Steve_ just to see if Spencer’ll stop and turn around. It'd be so easy. But the dreams feel too real now, and maybe it’d be an acknowledgment of something Jimmy has no control over, has never had control over. So he doesn’t call out a name that feels more like home than anything else ever has, keeps his mouth shut and his head down and his sanity, maybe, for a just a while longer. 

He slams the trunk closed and watches Spencer’s figure get smaller and smaller until he rounds the corner and disappears from sight.

*

So Jimmy has these dreams, and sometimes it feels like he never really wakes up from them.

Sometimes, he wonders if they’ll have to lose each other _againandagainandagain_ before they’re ever given a chance to get it right.

*

Only in this version, that isn’t how the story ends.

That’s how Jimmy thinks of them now, at twenty years old: _versions_ , variants, carbon paper facsimiles of the originals, but anyway -

 _Anyway_ , in this version, Jimmy’s sitting in a tiny café in Berkeley, squinting at the blinking cursor of a frustratingly blank Google doc for an assignment when a body drops down into the chair opposite him and he hears _Steve Rogers never woke up when they dug him out of that block of ice_.

Spencer’s gotten taller, but only just. He's eighteen now, Jimmy guesses, looks like he’d maybe come up to Jimmy’s eyeline instead of his nose, looks less stick and more lithe as he sits across the table. Jimmy tries to picture an imposing mass of human in his place - hulking muscles and All-American jaw - but it won’t compute in his head. 

_This_ version is a lot shorter and a little more approachable at first glance - but still kind, and generous, and the bravest person Jimmy _doesn’t even know_. He’s beautiful in a quiet sort of way and maybe _this version_ isn’t necessarily the right one, but it ain’t the wrong one, either.

He’s got a coffee in his hands, and his glasses have slipped too far down the bridge of his nose. It reminds Jimmy of the last time they saw each other. There’s a sketchpad on the table now, in front of Jimmy’s open laptop, loose papers sticking out from it haphazardly, and Spencer has charcoal stains on his fingers (long - they’re still long, still able to curl into a fist to defend someone who needs it, Jimmy thinks. Or hopes). 

“They couldn’t revive him,” Spencer says. 

“ _Hi_ ,” Jimmy tells him, deliberate, and for his part, Spencer bows his head a bit as a flush creeps fast up his neck. 

He sets his coffee down, waves a hand and mumbles _Spence_. Adds impatiently: “But you know that already.”

Jimmy closes his laptop, catches the way Spencer starts to nervously pick at his coffee cup, and nods. “Yeah. I know.”

They shouldn’t be having this conversation; at least, not here, and not now, not when Jimmy hasn’t had any time to prepare himself, not when he has no fucking clue what to say. But as it turns out, it doesn’t end up being much of a problem. Spencer’s got them both covered, on the conversation front.

First thing he does is open his sketchbook, flip nearly to the end and fold the pages over the spiral binding at the top. He drops it down onto Jimmy’s laptop, right side up.

“I don’t remember drawing that today,” he says, and it’s rough - rough, but _there_ , painfully accurate, down to the panic on Jimmy’s - on _Bucky’s_ face, one hand gripping a broken rail, the other outstretched towards an unseen figure. 

“But it’s always the last dream I have with him in it.”

Jimmy studies it for a long time. This - this is the moment that wakes up him on rare occasions, the one dream that puts him in a mood for the rest of the day, if he isn’t careful. 

If he thinks about it, if he really concentrates, he can remember this exact moment. He can remember Bucky reaching out, thinking _No, not again, not again_ and _Please God pleasepleaseplease don’t let me_ -

And he can remember screaming. Wind so chilled and whipping that it hurts. He can remember Steve Rogers, wide-eyed and slack-jawed as he lost Bucky again between one beat of time and the next.

Jimmy can always remember the pain, even if it doesn’t really belong to him, not anymore.

“Come to my apartment, we can talk there,” he says. The words tumble out before he can stop them, not that he wants to take them back.

The look Spencer gives him is steady and for a single, stupidly heart-pounding moment, Jimmy thinks he’ll say no. 

But he nods instead.

*

“I never go to that café,” he says, when Jimmy’s unlocking the door to his apartment later. “Don’t even go to school near here.” He leans against the peeling wallpapered hallway with a messenger bag draped on one shoulder and his sketchpad hugged tight to his chest. “I just - I drew that, and then I got on the BART like I was in a fucking trance and something -”

“Something told you to come here?” Jimmy muses, teasing, and Spencer - Spencer smiles, mouth twitching up like it’s gotten the better of him. He shrugs. 

“Someone, maybe,” he says quietly, and the door to Jimmy’s apartment swings open. 

“Yeah,” he says, and watches Spencer brush past him. “Maybe.”

*

Here is what Jimmy knows about the start of Captain America, direct from grades K - 12: he was a scrawny, scrappy little fuck with the right kind of heroic attributes and when he was eventually injected with a serum that would heal every ailment he’d ever had and then some, it would only exaggerate the best parts of him. 

(Jimmy has seen photos of pre-serum Cap - looks vaguely like Spencer now, if Jimmy squints and the light is just _so_.)

Captain America, eventually and in all his self-sacrificing glory, nosedives a plane into the Atlantic with a Tesseract and a handful of WMDs on board, nosedives into the cold and _freezes_ , for decades upon decades. 

This is how it ends: they dig him out in early 2012, and no amount of serum or technological advances can wake him because Steve Rogers is dead dead _dead_ , has been dead, died long ago, before he’d ever had hope of getting rescued. 

“Sometimes I wake up,” Spencer says, hushed and standing in the middle of Jimmy’s living room, looking around like he’s not sure if he belongs in it, “and I’m so cold my bones feel stiff. And I wonder when it got so bad that even the serum couldn’t bring him back. If they’d only found him a few months earlier, he might’ve made it, they might’ve been able to do something.”

“Well, who’s to say when he died exactly,” Jimmy says then. “If he _had_ gone close to 2012, you’d only be, what? Two? But you aren’t. So - so who’s to say that like, this hasn’t happened before.”

“This,” Spencer repeats, careful, and Jimmy rummages around his tiny kitchen just to give himself the pretence of having something to do. 

“You know,” he glances over his shoulder. Spencer’s got his head cocked slightly, shoulders slouched, hands shoved deep in his pockets. “The dreams. The - lives.”

Another smile flickers across Spencer’s mouth then. 

“So you think - you think that’s what happened, too? They just - we just keep coming back. I mean, I - I only remember my - I remember Steve, and me, and that’s it, but that - there has to be more to it.”

Jimmy gets out two mugs, and doesn’t turn back around, not even when he hears Spencer’s footsteps come nearer. He reaches into the cabinet above the fridge, takes out a bottle of cheap vodka he bought with an even cheaper fake ID, pours them both a healthy shot even though he tries not to drink so much, this time around. 

It just really feels like a moment that calls for a little liquid courage.

He hands one mug over, and Spencer clinks his against the one Jimmy’s already got in his hand with an arched eyebrow and a dry twist to his mouth before they toss back the alcohol, all at once. Jimmy wipes at the corner of his mouth, takes Spencer’s mug back and sets both on the counter. He says with a forced sort of nonchalance, “Bucky survives the fall.”

He remembers the pain. Jimmy _always remembers the pain_. And that fact - that one isn’t in any history books, not in any Captain America comic or special edition graphic fucking novel or summer blockbuster that came after, not in anyone’s mind but _Jimmy’s_ , now, because all the people involved are dead and gone.

Spencer’s eyes are wide behind his glasses at that. He says _What_ and sounds, of all things, _scared_. 

He _should_ be scared, Jimmy thinks. 

He should be fucking terrified.

*

Jimmy tells him the whole gory story, slowly. They start off in the kitchen and migrate towards the sofa, curled up on opposite ends, two feet of distance between them. Keeps going, even as mid-afternoon turns into night, as the sun creeps through the windows of Jimmy’s apartment once more:

Because Jimmy’s dreams don’t end on the train, even if Spencer’s visions of him do, but they’re never as clear as they are before that moment. The rest of it comes to him in snatches, in frightening moments of haziness, like walking through a mirrored funhouse and only seeing a warped and twisted version of yourself. 

They’d pumped Bucky with his own brand of serum, before - the only reason he even survived - and did it again when Zola found him buried in the snow. Turned him into a device, turned him into a well-oiled machine built to slice and stab and shoot and kill and never ask questions, not one, not ever. 

(In those dreams, Bucky loses his arm and then loses himself.)

Jimmy hates this part, hates that it makes him pause. Makes him wonder how decent Bucky even was, makes him _doubt_ even if he knows Cap - even if he knows _Steve_ never would. Because if the serum only brought out the innate goodness in Steve, then what the hell was so broken in Bucky that he became a shell of a human instead?

“You - he was _tortured_ ,” Spencer says, and he sounds as fierce and protective as the Steve in any of Jimmy’s memories. Looks a little like he wants to shake some sense into him. “He was _brainwashed_ , you can’t - you can’t blame what he became on what was inside of him, because that’s not - that’s not _true_ , you can’t say things like that, you -”

He stops, huffs out a breath. There’s two feet of space between them but it might as well be the distance of the entire Atlantic and a cryogenic chamber, or train tracks and the harsh, unforgiving winter forest below them. 

“You can’t,” Spencer just repeats, and it cuts through the air with a tone of finality.

And - and he’s right. He is. But Jimmy is stuck with memories that hurt to have, memories of being woken up to a living nightmare, of having a hand in nearly every awful, chaotic thing and then some from the 40s and 50s that’re in the pages of countless countries’ history books. 

Memories of never forgetting a sickly kid from Brooklyn born with a fight in him meant for a man twice his size, meant for a man clad in good ol’ red white and blue. Of Bucky having his brain zapped again and again in order to burn the memories out until - until they fried him one too many times, and he wouldn’t wake up anymore.

But he does. 

Bucky - or the next version of him, anyway - wakes up and dies _again_ in yet another war. Lies about his age even though most of the country just wants it to be over, because he has these _images_ of him fighting another kind of battle with another kind of enemy. 

He’s barely seventeen in this one, a world away from home in Vietnam, in 1969, just shy of a week before his battalion was meant to withdraw, arm blown to shreds and too much blood lost to save him. Of course it was his fucking arm again - he could almost laugh if it wasn’t so damned screwed up. 

He nearly makes it to twenty-five, the next time. 

Dies of alcohol poisoning in ‘94, liver already beginning to scar over from cirrhosis, because he can’t take it this time. He can’t bear the burden of two major wars and so much phantom blood on his hands he feels like he’s slipping in it, drowning in it, _choking_ on it, and he can’t get the memories to leave, didn’t want them in the first fucking place.

And now? Now Jimmy is twenty, and he says with a shrug, even though there’s a weight on his shoulders that holds him down, “Maybe Buck’s just cursed to die young."

Spencer starts, rises so quick he stumbles and bangs a knee into the coffee table. He spits out, “Fuck you,” like it hurts and, “This time is different, it has to be,” like that _matters_.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Jimmy says, looking up at him. 

“At least this time I still have my arm.”

*

The door slams shut so hard when Spencer storms that it rattles the walls. Jimmy stays at his spot on the sofa for hours afterward, staring at nothing and thinking of everything, doesn’t realize until he finally gets up to piss that Spencer’s sketchbook is lying on the floor, forgotten. 

There’s a neatly printed label stuck to the back of it. _If found, please return to S. Roberts_ , with an address that’s located over the Bay Bridge, because of course Spencer labels his fucking sketchbooks. 

Jimmy gives himself a week, and then goes searching.

*

“Are those prescription?” Jimmy asks him, the second Spencer opens the door, and Spencer’s face twists up in confusion before he realizes.

“Oh. The glasses?”

“You - he never had any problems with his eyesight,” Jimmy says. “All that other shit - but never his eyes.”

Spencer shoves them up his nose and squints. “Yeah, well, I’m practically blind without them. So maybe not all of its the same.”

“No,” Jimmy agrees. And: “I have your sketchbook.”

Spencer lets his head rest on the frame of the doorway and says, “I left it on purpose.”

*

They fall into each other like they were always meant to - _which_. Jimmy doesn't want to dream of past lives anymore, just wants nights where he's like - where he's swimming in fucking pudding, or naked in front of his lecture hall, laughing as he retells them, laughing as he forgets them halfway through.

He doesn't want to be this old.

He doesn't want to doubt if he and Spence would've been friends if they hadn't been Bucky and Steve, first.

Because it feels like something good, seeing him. To sit across from him in that café (an eventual weekly visit on Spencer's part that turns into a tradition). To find himself in Spencer's own apartment - even smaller and dingier than Jimmy's - and feel like he knows these walls, this home, this boy. 

It feels good for Spencer to crash at his place, conked out on the sofa after a Netflix marathon with his head on Jimmy's shoulder and a wrinkle between his brows that Jimmy could smooth out, if he wanted.

And Jimmy has these dreams about the skinny blond guy from his high school drawing class, right? And about the eighteen year old art student with kind eyes hidden behind wide glasses.

(Spencer snuffles in his sleep, head slipping so it falls down to Jimmy's chest and Jimmy doesn't smooth out the wrinkle but he slouches into Spencer's drooping body, just a bit, and selfishly hopes he's out for awhile.)

And, sometimes, he has this dream about a scrappy little punk that Bucky never stopped looking up to; a dream that never changes, no matter how many times Jimmy sees it, which makes him think it might've only happened once.

Steve and Bucky, both drunk - Bucky moreso, even though back then Steve had the tolerance of a kid who'd never touched a drop of alcohol before - and it's the middle of winter -

It's always the middle of winter, Jimmy never dreams of spring, no matter that his entire life is about being reborn, again and again -

And Bucky is laughing about something and Steve is too, but he's shivering, and his lips are blue and Jimmy - and _Bucky_ thinks, y'know, there are ways to fix that;

He must say it out loud because Steve abruptly stops laughing, leans a little against the wall of their broken down Brooklyn apartment, head swaying in place and he's just drunk enough to say _So what're ya waiting for - ?_

Jimmy always wakes up then, confused as to whether it's something cemented in reality or an alternate version the real Bucky had in his head for years.

It makes him sad, in a way he can't place or name, makes him want something he's still not entirely sure he's allowed to have.

Makes him wonder if that's the thing they're supposed to get right, this time.

*

"How come I never see you with a girlfriend?" Jimmy asks him one night, at four am at a twenty-four hour Mexican joint because Jimmy had another dream about falling and the only thing that seemed like it'd make him feel better was driving across the bridge and calling Spencer only when he was standing in front of his apartment.

Spencer sets his torta down and stares just long enough after the question for Jimmy to swallow down some indefinable thing and tack on a careful, "Boyfriend?"

Spencer waits, and says, "Either, I guess," like that's an answer. Jimmy kicks him in the shin.

A smile tugs at Spencer's mouth, but it looks more rueful than anything else. "How come I never see you with anyone, either?" he tosses back, and Jimmy glances away, and then down at his food.

"Finish eating," he suggests. "I wanna watch the sunrise."

Spencer kicks his shin in retaliation. Jimmy figures he deserves that one.

*

"Spencer Roberts," Jimmy says, for the hundredth time that night, with a cloud of smoke billowing out of his mouth and red, red eyes. He hands the piece over and thumps backward onto the carpet, squints up at a water stain on his ceiling. "Spenceeeeer... Rooooberts."

"Shut up," Spencer laughs. "It doesn't sound any less weird the more you say it."

They're on the floor of Jimmy's apartment, and maybe Jimmy doesn't drink so much in this life, but he's not opposed to someone offering to smoke him up every now and then. When Spencer shows up at ten on a Saturday with a caged look in his eye and a dub, he figures they're long due for one, anyway.

"At least I got Jimmy this time. It's closer," he says, watching Spencer light the bowl, hold his thumb over the carb and inhale 'til his lungs fill. He passes the piece to Jimmy still lit, and he holds it in, the ends of his mouth quirked into this smile.

"You look - like you're constipated," Jimmy tells him then, coughing out his hit. Spencer laughs again, smoke spilling from his mouth.

He coughs a few times, too, pounds on his chest and lies down next to Jimmy once it's under control, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. Jimmy blindly feels for the coffee table, sets the bowl down on it for now. Spencer brushes a hand through his hair, lets his arm flop back so he can tuck his hand under his head and sighs, "Really glad I don't have asthma, this time."

"No asthma, blind as a bat," Jimmy scoffs. "It's like I don't even know you."

The laughter he gets in response to that is softer, almost an afterthought. Jimmy turns his head. Spencer's looking up at the ceiling, ends of his mouth still lilting faintly up, head tipped back a bit so all Jimmy can see is the line of his throat, the edge of his jaw.

"You look better," he says, and Spencer turns his head at that.

"What?"

"You looked - I don't know, you looked weird when you got here. What'd you dream about?"

It's quiet, for a long time. Jimmy lets his eyes fall shut. The high is already building, starts a hyper aware tingling from his toes, up, until it's like a wave crashing into him again and again, makes his tongue feel thick and his limbs heavy, as if they'll sink into the ground if he isn't careful.

"Something I'm not sure really happened or not," Spencer says, weighted. Jimmy's head swims and he thinks of the middle of winter and his best friend challenging him to a kiss. He opens his eyes and Spencer is staring right back at him with hooded lids, and, and, _and_ -

The hand stuck between them reaches out; fingers skate over Jimmy's wrist, the back of his hand, and Jimmy inhales molasses slow because this isn't a surprise, it really isn't. Just feels a little like something clicking into place.

“I’ve been dreaming about variations of you since I was fourteen,” Spencer tells him, and Jimmy's ribcage is broken open, heart on display, beating so hard he swears Spencer must feel it, too. “And in every single one, you go away."

Jimmy faces the ceiling again, shuts his eyes.

"So maybe this time, I don’t," he says. "Maybe this time I even make it to _forty_ -"

The body next to his rolls over, and then Spencer kisses him, only once, just a hard press of mouths, glasses digging into Jimmy's cheek. He plants a hand next to Jimmy's head when he breaks away, legs tangled together, and Jimmy blinks his eyes open again.

Spencer looks - anxious, but hiding it. _Terrified_ , but buried under a thick layer of determination.

And he always was the braver of the two of them, wasn't he?

Jimmy lets himself study, lets his eyes roam over Spencer's features, to the familiar slope of his nose, the long line of his neck, the way his shirt hangs a little and Jimmy can see a collarbone peeking out that he just really wants to touch. And maybe that dream, the one where it's midwinter and Bucky is kissing a boy even though boys don't kiss boys, not then, anyway - maybe it happened. Maybe it happened more than once.

Maybe it was just wishful thinking, and the want never died even when _they_ did, over and over.

But -

"I'm me," Spencer says with surprising clarity, even if his eyes are bloodshot from the weed. "Aren't I? I mean, I'm - I'm him, too, and I think that's why - I think that's how it started, but."

He stops. Jimmy lifts a lazy hand, drops it with a soft thump at the small of Spencer's back.

"But we don't have to be anyone but ourselves," Spencer finishes, and Jimmy gives a throaty laugh at that.

"Whoever they are," he says wryly. There's a beat, and Spencer's smile breaks, a laugh of his own punching out of him.

"Whoever they are," he agrees, and leans back down, smiles right up against Jimmy's mouth.

When Jimmy falls asleep that night, it's with Spencer tucked under his chin, under the covers of his bed, lips swollen and body achingly content, and for the first time in years, he doesn't have a single dream of winter or solitude or falling, falling, falling.

*

Jimmy has these dreams, sometimes, of a boy in a hallway, of a boy in Brooklyn, of a man with a shield.

And one day - one day he wakes up sprawled in the middle of a bed to the sound of pans scraping loud on the stove and he gets up and finds a variation of that same person in the kitchen, wearing boxers, and Jimmy's shirt with the words "Berkeley Alum" stretched across it.

Spencer smacks his hand away with the handle of a spatula when Jimmy tries to steal a piece of bacon from a pile cooling on a handful of paper towels.

And _one day_ , it hits Jimmy harder than an oncoming train -

Or like falling off of one. 

He steals Spencer's glasses instead, only gives them back when Spencer crowds him against the counter like he doesn't have to stand on tiptoe just to match their heights, after Jimmy's stolen a _kiss_ , too, one or ten or - well, a lot, mostly just because he can.

Maybe - maybe the point isn’t that they always lose each other. 

Maybe the point is that, eventually, they have always been found.


End file.
